Fluent in at least seven languages, including Arabic, Turkish and Persian, and a writer of ravishing prose accounts of her journeys, Freya Stark was one of the great travel writers of the century. In 1934 her first book, "Valley of the Assasins", was hailed as a classic and T.E. Lawrence pronounced her "a gallant creature, a remarkable person". It marked the beginning of a dazzling career as writer, explorer, and unofficial diplomat which led her to explore ancient trading routes of the Yemen desert, Crusaders' castles in ...
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Fluent in at least seven languages, including Arabic, Turkish and Persian, and a writer of ravishing prose accounts of her journeys, Freya Stark was one of the great travel writers of the century. In 1934 her first book, "Valley of the Assasins", was hailed as a classic and T.E. Lawrence pronounced her "a gallant creature, a remarkable person". It marked the beginning of a dazzling career as writer, explorer, and unofficial diplomat which led her to explore ancient trading routes of the Yemen desert, Crusaders' castles in Syria, and Alexander the Great's path through Turkey. She frequently travelled, alone and female, through dangerous and uncomfortable territories and was, on one occasion rescued by the Royal Air Force. During World War II, she worked hard to win Islamic people to the Allied cause and toured the United States for the British Ministry of Information. By this time her fame was considerable and her conversation attracted a hugely diverse social circle to her hilltop Italian home. She continued to travel and write widley well into her old age - climbing in the lower slopes of Mount Everest in her late 80s - and lived to reach 100, leaving a legacy of over 30 volumes of travel writings, autobiography and letters.
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Seller's Description:
Very good in Very good jacket. VGC. Chatto and Windus, 1999. First UK edition-first printing(2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1). Black hardback with laminated Dj cover(a couple of nicks and scratches on the laminated cover), both in VGC. Ex-Library book with stamp, pocket, sticker but in VGC. Illustrated with b/w photos, drawings, maps. Nice and clean pages with a ink mark and light shelf wear on the outer edges, small colour mark on the edge of the first page of the book, a couple of creases and nicks on the edges of the pages. The book is in VGC with light shelf wear.420pp including Bibliography, notes, list of illustrations and index. Price un-clipped. A collectable first edition. This is another paragraph Review: One image stands out from Jane Geniesse's new biography of the writer and explorer Dame Freya Stark. Taken just after her first trip to Damascus in 1928, it is a photograph of Stark in full Arab dress: a remarkable emblem of this woman's passion for the East, her inchoate wish to explore the mysteries of a new land. Born to Flora and Robert Stark on January 31, 1893, Stark was, on the one hand, a creature of the late 19th century: a woman brought up within the repressive confines of Victorian family life. On the other hand, that family life was erratic, nomadic, even scandalous. In particular, Flora Stark looms large in Freya's life: a mother, driven by her own desires for domestic and artistic independence, from whom her daughter struggles to break free. The connection between that struggle and Freya's passion for travel--the lure of the East in her eyes--is one of the obscure, but fascinating, threads to emerge from Geniesse's biography. Battling against frail health, as well as social convention, Stark carved out a place for herself as an outstanding cultural explorer and commentator. At the same time, as Geniesse uncovers, she engaged in a lifelong struggle against low self-esteem (a terrible accident as a child left her permanently scarred) to become the star of her own adventure story. Bringing into focus Stark's personal and public personae, Geniesse has written an absorbing and timely account of a woman who played a key part in the charged encounter between Europe and the Middle East in the 20th century.
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Seller's Description:
F in F- jacket. F/F-. 8vo. original charcoal boards in dustwrapper (a trifle rubbed & sunned); pp. xxiv, 404 (last blank), with maps + illustrations. Heavy item (1.1 kg), additional postage may be required for international delivery. A fine copy.
